Tech
Tesla’s robotaxis are moving in reverse
Tesla’s budding “Robotaxi” network drove fewer miles for paying customers in the second quarter than it did in the first, according to a chart the company released on Wednesday.
The quarter-over-quarter decline runs counter to Tesla’s rhetoric and actions in the past year. Tesla has staked much of its future on the idea of a massive, low-cost, cash-generating Robotaxi fleet — or going “balls to the wall for autonomy,” as CEO Elon Musk framed it in 2024. The quarterly step-down in Robotaxi miles also comes amid weakening profits in Tesla’s core businesses, which underperformed Wall Street’s expectations, according to figures released Wednesday. Tesla’s stock plunged more than 13% in early trading on Thursday.
At a passing glance, the chart appears to show steady growth in paid Robotaxi rides between August 2025 and June 2026. But the numbers displayed are cumulative, and when broken down by quarter, they show that Tesla’s Robotaxi fleet of Model Y SUVs carrying paying passengers covered around 1.1 million miles in the first quarter. That fell to roughly 700,000 miles in the second quarter, a decline of about 36%.
That’s despite the fact that the company has expanded its nascent operation to six cities across Texas and Florida, with a mix of unsupervised and supervised vehicles.
It’s likely Tesla is counting the paid miles driven in the San Francisco Bay Area, too, even though these branded Robotaxis don’t have the state-required permits to operate autonomously and also have a safety driver behind the wheel. Tesla has referred to that operation as part of its “Robotaxi coverage.”
The decline in miles driven also comes as Tesla made a striking admission on a conference call Wednesday about its second-quarter results. In response to a question about how slowly Tesla is scaling the Robotaxi service, Musk said the company needs to “accumulate driving data that is specific to the Cybercab” — the company’s gold, purpose-built, two-seater sedan that is expected to make up the bulk of its autonomous vehicle fleet — “before we can put a lot of them on the road.”
“Unlike, say, Model 3, Model Y, and our other vehicles where we’ve got a lot of vehicles on the road, millions of vehicles on the road, we don’t have that for Cybercab. So we actually have to accumulate miles with Cybercabs that are retrofitted with steering wheels and acceleration and braking pedals, that kind of thing, to calibrate to the Cybercab chassis,” he said. “As we are confident about that, the number of Cybercabs in cities will increase dramatically.”
This represents something of a break from claims the company has made for years about how its fleet of nearly 10 million customer cars has been silently collecting data in the background to train future robotaxis (in addition to training the driver assistance software for consumers, which Tesla calls Full Self-Driving).
On the call, Tesla executives framed the slow progress as a matter of being cautious about safety.
“Our goals are very ambitious for Robotaxi, but we do need to be cautious about causing any accidents or causing any harm to anyone,” Musk said.
He then said he doesn’t want Tesla Robotaxis causing accidents because he thinks bad media coverage could lead to a regulatory crackdown.
“Although there are, I think, 30 to 40,000 automotive deaths per year in the United States alone, most of those do not generate any press, you don’t really read about almost any of those. But if we injure even one person, it will be worldwide headline news, and regulators will immediately clamp down on our activities,” he said.
Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s VP of AI, boasted that Tesla’s Robotaxis have had “zero notable incidents” while driving “more than 380,000 miles” without a safety operator onboard. He did not define what the company considers “notable incidents,” though he claimed that “any reports have been of other actors impacting us when we were stationary.”
Tesla has reported 22 crashes to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in the year since it started trialing its Robotaxi service. While most of them involve other cars crashing into Tesla’s Robotaxis, the company has reported three crashes caused by its teleoperators moving the vehicles remotely, and multiple instances of the cars hitting objects at low speeds including curbs, utility poles, and a tow truck’s bed.
This represents another narrative change for the company. Tesla spent years claiming that the largest hurdle to full-scale Robotaxi deployment was regulatory in nature — though the company never really specified what those prohibitive regulations were.
Now the company says proving safety is all that’s holding Robotaxis back. And although it is still in the very early stages, Tesla still chose this moment to take a victory lap about its decision to build an autonomy stack that doesn’t use radar or lidar sensors, like industry leader Waymo.
“Historically, the so-called experts have always claimed that you need lidars, radars, HD maps, and the entire kitchen sink to drive safely. Here, we show that such is not true. You can have safe, comfortable, and affordable autonomy with just cameras,” Elluswamy said.
Both Musk and Elluswamy also promised growth is coming. They noted that the number of unsupervised miles traveled has grown roughly 10% every week since Tesla started offering them at the end of last year.
“We’ll continue to scale, I think, very, very rapidly,” Musk said.
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Tech
Google’s Gemini nears billion-user milestone
Google is about to add another name to its long list of products with more than a billion users, a list that already includes Search, Gmail, Drive, Android, YouTube, and Chrome. The company said during its Q2 2026 call that the AI assistant Gemini now has over 950 million monthly users.
The company noted that Gemini users have tripled from last year. Earlier, in February, it said that the Gemini app crossed 750 million monthly active users. With this growth, Google’s assistant is in line to compete more closely with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which hit 1 billion monthly active users in June.
“Users love new agentic features like Daily Brief and our personalized agent, Gemini Spark, which is now available in the U.S. and internationally. We’ve been shipping helpful new features like this at an incredible pace,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said during the call.
Apart from users on Android, the Gemini app has found a strong user base on iOS with launches like the Nano Banana image generation model. According to Appfigures, the app has been downloaded over 137 million times on iOS in the last 12 months.
In its latest “State of AI” report, the analytics firm Sensor Tower noted that ChatGPT’s market share among AI assistants fell below 50% for the first time. The report, which looked at H1 2026, also noted that Gemini’s share rose to 27.7%.
Many people already use AI assistant apps as a substitute for search. However, Google reported that its search vertical is going strong, partially thanks to the AI-centric overhaul. During this quarter, its Q&A-style AI mode crossed 1 billion users. The company said that it is driving “an incremental increase” in search queries. Google also noted that through hardware engineering, it has reduced the cost of AI mode for the company, despite introducing new models and features.
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Tech
Google will now let you sign in to your account with a selfie video
Google is adding a selfie video option as a new way for users to log in to their accounts, the company announced on Thursday, joining a growing wave of tech companies betting that biometrics and not passwords are the future of identity verification online. The tech giant says selfie videos give users more options to sign in if they’re ever locked out or don’t have access to their usual phone or computer.
Users set up a selfie video by looking at their device’s camera and completing a few guided head movements — think turning right or left or nodding — to capture multiple angles of their face. If a user is having trouble signing in later, they can take another selfie video to get back into their account, and Google will then compare the new video to the one used at setup to confirm it’s the correct person.
The bigger challenge Google is trying to solve is proving a real human, not a bot or a doctored video, is on the other side of the camera. “When you use a selfie to sign in, we use multiple layers of security to help prevent impersonation attempts like fake photos and videos (i.e., deep fakes),” Google wrote in the blog post. “For example, we match your video against your saved selfie and require you to perform simple movements to prove it’s a live video. We also use our standard security practices to detect and help prevent suspicious sign-in attempts.”
This isn’t just about individual accounts, though. As AI-generated video gets more convincing, “liveness” checks are becoming a baseline requirement for any company handling logins, payments, or sensitive data.
Although the new option could help protect accounts against fraud and help users recover locked accounts, it also raises concerns around user privacy and biometric data collection, an area regulators have increasingly scrutinized as more companies build products around facial and voice data.
Google says selfie videos are stored securely using encryption and remain protected even when they’re not being used, and that users can choose to delete the videos from their Google account at any time.
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Tech
Meta launched a new AI optimism ad set to a song about human extinction
Meta’s newest advertisement begins with a black-and-white shot of an eye, showing us what someone sees as they read countless panicked headlines about how AI is going to take our jobs, isolate us, and spark a global crisis.
“Some people will have you believe AI is going to make us feel less connected. That it’s going to leave us behind,” a voiceover says. “We couldn’t disagree more.”
Suddenly, the video shifts to color, and shows a cycle of different people opening their eyes and smiling. Then, we see a couple dancing on a rooftop, pointing at a rainbow; a group of teens swimming in a lake; a child frolicking in a field; friends embracing after time apart.
“Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want. But we’re betting on people, and we like those odds,” the voiceover says. “The future is for everyone.”
That’s a nice sentiment — pretty convenient for a company betting hundreds of billions of dollars that AI will revolutionize humanity. But the strangest part of the advertisement is not that we’re watching these happy moments play out via Instagram posts. It’s that the soundtrack to the ad is the David Bowie song “Five Years.”
If you are not familiar with this song, I urge you to give it a listen, read the lyrics, and think about what it is trying to say. It seems clear to me, but I studied poetry in college, so as a control for this experiment, I asked my brother — a blockchain analyst who loves Claude Code and does not read for fun — if he could tell me what the song is about.
“I thought climate change at first, then zombie apocalypse, then an asteroid hitting the earth,” he told me. He is correct. It is a song about the human race panicking after learning they will die in a mass-extinction event in five years.
If you’re not familiar with Bowie’s music, this track might sound happy and inspiring, matching the ad’s upbeat tone. The part of the song that is used for the advertisement was probably chosen because it uses the word “people” over and over again, and without the context of the song, it’s not clear what it’s about.
But if we look at the lines directly preceding this section:
News had just come over
We had five years left to cry in
News guy wept and told us
Earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet
Then I knew he was not lying
We “had five years left to cry in” and the “earth was really dying.” It’s pretty bleak.
It is not reassuring to convince people that AI is going to make the world better while playing a song about the end of the world, and yet, this contradictory musical choice seems to have sailed right past everyone at Meta, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“Meta has always believed in giving people the power to share, connect, and shape your world in the ways you want,” he wrote alongside the video. “As we enter this next wave with AI, we continue to believe the future is for everyone. We’re focused on giving every person the tools to reach your full potential and making sure the benefits of technology are distributed to everyone.”
Then again, tech leaders are not known for their literary analysis skills. Meta’s Oculus used to give new hires copies of the science fiction novel “Ready Player One,” which is set in a dystopia in which a tech company making virtual reality products becomes overly powerful and evil. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has directly cited inspiration from the movie “Her,” which warns us about what can go wrong when we use AI for emotional support. Palantir, a company that builds AI surveillance systems for the government, is named after Palantir, a seeing stone from the “Lord of the Rings” franchise that the Dark Lord uses to spy on his enemies. Elon Musk is currently throwing a fit about the “accuracy” of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey,” a story with such realistic elements as sea monsters, magic, and divine intervention. These guys make a great argument for the value of studying the humanities.
Meta isn’t alone in its recent promotional foibles. Instead of racing to build AGI, the top AI companies seem to be fighting over who can make the creepiest advertisement. A few weeks ago, Anthropic released an eerie video of its own. As my colleague Lucas Ropek described it:
The ad begins with a video of a burning house (not exactly a heartwarming start) before pivoting to a series of still images. These images include a crowd of people being surveilled by facial recognition, a homeless person sleeping on the street, rows upon rows of tombstones in a cemetery, and what appears to be a group of laborers toiling in a mine where (presumably) raw materials for smartphones are being dug up.
Meanwhile, a voice-over track features different people asking questions like “Can AI be trusted?” and “Who’s gonna hit the brakes if we need to?”
Anthropic is trying to convince us that it understands the risks AI poses to society, and therefore, this is the company that people can trust to develop AI responsibly. The message it actually conveys feels closer to the mood of Bowie’s “Five Years.”
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman responded to the Anthropic ad, “I thought this was satire, kept looking for the handle to be spelled c1audeai or something.”
As these companies spar to control the public perception of AI, their efforts don’t seem to be making much progress. A recent Pew survey found that only 16% of Americans think that AI’s impact on society over the next 20 years will be positive, and 40% believe it will have a negative impact. Better luck next time, Meta.
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